Mann’s naked climate activism

Penn State University stadium

Someone thought I needed to work this climate stuff out and helpfully cited a PennState climate course. The course was written by one Michael Mann, no less, with an assistant. It took me two seconds to learn that the course is ineradicably rooted in global warming activism, not science.

They cover the science too (or as much of it as avoids the lack of evidence for a human cause of dangerous warming), but as an afterthought: they first insist shamelessly that climate change is “one of the great environmental challenges of our time.”

I might keep reading through the course if time allows, just to uncover further appalling deceptions. If this is how it begins, they will surely be numerous. If you question my use of ‘deception’, please ask yourself what explanation there could be when scientists in any field don’t disclose what they know. If they are competent climate scientists, then they know there’s no evidence for a human cause of dangerous global warming. If they fail to disclose that lack of evidence, they are deceivers; otherwise they are at the very least incompetent.

The simple course, if they know of evidence, is to declare it, and then we’ll all know.

There’s absolutely no reason to suppose the course contains evidence of human culpability, since the WGI of the AR5 certainly doesn’t, and yet it’s the first item on the reading list, along with the SPM. Why should Michael Mann publish evidence that the IPCC does not have?

The website fronts well: presented by the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science in the PennState College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, it sounds properly grounded in science, as we see in the course outline. But there’s a shock in store for the unsuspecting academic. Click Lesson 1; the outline mentions climate science and fundamental principles. Then click Introduction and read the first sentence:

Human-caused climate change represents one of the great environmental challenges of our time.

This is global warming activism, not an objective, academic search for truth. The whole introduction is in the same vein, and its express intention to “first lay down the fundamental scientific principles behind climate change and global warming” is at first reassuring but goes sour immediately when it says “we go on to explore other issues involving climate change impacts and the issue of mitigation — that is, solutions to dealing with the challenges presented by climate change.” Never mind the science, feel the policy.

What is Climate? briefly sketches climate and launches straight into a description of climate change—clearly considered the most important feature of climate.

Importance: Why Should We Care About Climate Change? introduces a ‘concern’ about global warming I have never heard expressed in a scientific context:

One misconception is that the threat of climate change has to do with the absolute warmth of the Earth. That is not, in fact, the case. It is, instead, the rate of change that has scientists concerned. Living things, including humans, can easily adapt to substantial changes in climate as long as the changes take place slowly, over many thousands of years or longer. However, adapting to changes that are taking place on timescales of decades is far more challenging.

It’s been crystal clear for more than three decades that the activist climate scientists focus precisely on the temperatures that will be achieved by 2100. Sure, they say we must hurry, but they never say that those temperatures are unimportant, and the problem is that we will reach them too quickly. Yet here we have a university course claiming “never mind the heat, feel the speed.” It’s an unaccountable change of tack.

Dare I suggest it’s a change of climate in the teaching of climate change? But then, in describing why the rate of change causes concern, the narrative stumbles, loses clarity and is unpersuasive.

At one point the authors betray a linguistic shortcoming when they say: “Nonetheless, the conveyor belt is a useful mnemonic” when they mean metaphor. Ah well, grammar’s not their forte, is it?

But then, is even Mann-made global warming their forte? They have no evidence for it.

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